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Child Protection

Too much of our child protection policy has been constructed following tragic cases. I am afraid that I can go back a lot further than the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). At the beginning of my time in this House, I served on the Committee considering the Bill that was introduced after three very tragic cases during the mid-1980s and the Cleveland child abuse case. Those cases, of course, provided very different perspectives. The inquiries into the cases of the three children who died saw them as a failure of agencies to work together effectively and the failure of social services departments to intervene, especially when parents were avoiding contact. The Cleveland case was on the other side of the issue, and the social services and the medical profession were criticised for over-zealous diagnosis of sexual abuse and intervention that was too hasty and overrode the rights of parents. Somehow, in the midst of all that, we had to construct legislation. At the same time, social workers were trying to do their job with very different messages coming from this House and the world outside. The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) talked about his visits to Denmark and other Scandinavian countries, and how well they were doing in respect for social workers. When I made such visits, the social pedagogues told me that they would not be able to work in the same way if they had our press. They said, ““We don't have everything that we do paraded in tabloids. We don't know how people ever go into social work in the UK, because whatever decision they take is frequently pilloried.”” We must all take some responsibility for that, and I am afraid that the earlier exchange would perhaps reinforce that view among social workers rather than making them feel that people in this House were seriously trying to come to terms with what is happening in the world in which they are working. During the passage of the Children Act 1989—I invite the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham to read some of the exchanges that took place—I had to work extremely hard to get the then Government to take seriously the suggestion that training should be written into it. It was a battle royal to get training written in as one of the basic requirements for early-years workers and those working with vulnerable children. We cannot eliminate risk altogether, although we sometimes talk as though that were possible. Some of our press certainly talk as though we could. We cannot do that. People have to be enabled to make sound and robust judgments, but it must be clear what is expected of workers in a particular position. The tragedy at the moment is that workers are totally risk-averse. I talk to lots of directors of children's services and chief executives, and it seems that the system has become totally risk-averse. That is not in the interests of children, either. It is in our interests and theirs to have more long-term strategic objectives, which we allow people to get on with and to work with. Yes, we should inspect and, yes, we should hold people to account, but we should recognise the seriousness of the job that people are doing in a way that enables them to make sound judgments. We also have to do far more to support parents. The risks are greater when parents are not confident, sure or able to take the right decisions. So, the early intervention that the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) talked about and that I have talked about until everybody is bored silly is still at the heart of good child protection. We need effectively to support parents in their role as parents. We should not see parenting as a natural skill that everybody has. I do not know any parent who, when they are being honest late at night, says that it is all easy and straightforward. Every parent has huge challenges and huge difficulties. It is our responsibility to ensure that the support for parents is such that we tackle child protection in a much more serious way.